Until it happens to you, it’s just another news story. Cybercrime affects millions of people around the world every day. New threats are constantly emerging, but the goal is always to steal consumer or business information and monetize it. With the popularity of e-commerce and online banking comes new opportunities for cybercriminals to cause harm. Security companies, like Malwarebytes, are leading the fight against breaches with the latest techniques and exhaustive research methods based on customer telemetry data to provide products that safeguard consumers and businesses alike.

Researchers at cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes discovered that the so-called ‘drive-by cryptomining’ malware had managed to infect Android phones and redirect them to a website running cryptocurrency mining code that automatically sucks a phone’s processing power to crunch equations needed to generate Monero.

Smartphone users are just as vulnerable to cryptocurrency mining hijacks as their PC counterparts, and sometimes on a dramatic scale. Malwarebytes has detailed a “drive-by” mining campaign that redirected millions of Android users to a website that hijacked their phone processors for mining Monero. While the exact trigger wasn’t clear, researchers believed that infected apps with malicious ads would steer people toward the pages. And it wasn’t subtle — the site would claim that you were showing “suspicious” web activity and tell you that it was mining until you entered a captcha code to make it stop.